


It Takes a Lot to Know a Man

by Anonymous



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (but hurt/no comfort for Lisa), Angsty Schmoop, Forced Voyeurism, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Kink Meme, Lisa Braeden Finds Out About Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, M/M, POV Lisa Braeden, Past Lisa Braeden/Dean Winchester, Protective Dean Winchester, Service Top, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:15:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21904339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: "If there were a way you could see what he's doing right now," said the girl, "would you take it?"//For a kinkmeme prompt asking for Lisa accepting supernatural help to get a glimpse of Dean and getting more than she bargained for.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 22
Kudos: 81
Collections: Supernatural Anon Kink Meme





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For [this](https://spnkink-meme.livejournal.com/155538.html?thread=47295122#t47295122) kinkmeme prompt: _In S6, a demon or some other supernatural creature offers Lisa a way to spy on Dean. She just wants to know what the love of her life is up to, and okay, maybe she's always wondered masochistically about him and Sam, but when she sees way more than she bargained on, she discovers she's stuck. She can't leave until whatever devil she made a deal with says she can...and what she's witnesing just keeps getting worse._

"If there were a way you could see what he's doing right now, would you take it?"

Lisa swiveled slowly on her barstool to face her interlocutor. This turned out to be a young woman, twenty-five at the most, with a round face, dark pixie cut, overdone makeup, and knockoff Doc Martens. She stared back at Lisa sardonically. No twenty-five-year-old should be able to look like that.

"Excuse me?" Lisa said after the girl failed to apologize for quite obviously having the wrong person.

"The guy you're here to forget. But can't and don't really want to. The one you resent for having a whole other existence you'll never even be able to picture, even though you tell yourself you want nothing to do with it all because you're sensible. The one you can't stand never really belonging with you, much less to you. If there were a way you could see what he's doing right now, would you do it?"

It didn't take Lisa that whole speech for her mind to start screaming at her to get away; the third sentence was enough to make it very clear that whatever this girl was, 'human' wasn't on her résumé. But the bar was packed, and Lisa's car was a block away, and all the klaxons in her head were hammering on the point that she had no defenses at all.

"Oh, for Christ's sake. I'm not going to do anything to you. I can't, without your permission. No, go on, by all means, bolt back home, pack up your kid, relocate. We can do this all over again in Pasadena or wherever."

"What are you?" Lisa thought her voice remarkably steady.

"Now we're getting somewhere." The girl drained her Jack and Coke and signaled the bartender for another. "I'm in the wish-granting business. Not, in case you were wondering, the in-exchange-for-your-soul kind."

"Then in exchange for what?"

"What else? In exchange for the view."

"The view you're offering me?"

"Exactly."

Lisa intended to say, "Go back to Hell and tell the whole place to get fucked." What she somehow said instead was, "That makes no sense."

"Sure it does. I'm a…call me a professional voyeur. Like a pap, only I get paid just by making my camera go click-click. The catch is, you're the camera."

"Is that supposed to make this enticing somehow?"

"Of course not. What I'm offering's already enticing. Being upfront about it just cuts down on bullshit. So, what do you say?"

"Go back to Hell," said Lisa, "and if you have any sense of self-preservation at all, stay there."

* * *

Next time, the girl showed up at one of Ben's baseball games. "Nice day for it," she said, plunking down on the bleacher immediately behind Lisa. She was wearing exactly the same thing she had been in the bar over a week ago, jean skirt, tank top, thin black cardi. The gothy makeup looked even weirder in the full light of day.

"You are dead," Lisa growled. "When he finds you, and he will find you—"

"That'd be a feat, considering he doesn't know I exist. Anyway, you want to get on with this? You can send the kid to go hang with Aunt Claire if you want privacy. The irony would be a bit much, considering, but I don't judge."

Lisa watched a little white ball streak over green grass with her heart in her throat in a way it never had been back at the bar. She couldn't see Ben. Was he in the dugout? Was the coach with him? The coach was surely with him. The coach was six-foot-three, two-twenty at least, and sure some of that was beer gut but most of it was still muscle except none of it mattered because there wasn't a thing he could do to protect her son if—

"I already told you, I couldn't even if I wanted to. I get my juice from watching. I can't watch without a willing pair of eyes. It's not so much that I'd mind ripping you to shreds as that there's no point for me. So I say again: can we get down to it, please?"

"You need a willing pair of eyes? Well, I'm not willing."

"Sure you are." Down on the field, somebody hit a good one; perfunctory applause rippled through the parents smattered over the bleachers and the girl joined in. "You're going to do this, Lisa. If you weren't, you would have called him up and told him about me."

"How do you know I didn't?" Lisa meant it to sound icy, but it came out a shade too defensive.

"Because I'm a _mind-reader,_ duh. Do I need to do a run-down of all the annoying shit you're thinking about my fashion sense to prove it, soccer mommy?"

"I don't have time for this," Lisa said, eyes on the field. Where the hell was Ben? "I'm here to support my kid, then I'm helping at the after-party, then—"

"—Then you've got a client right before your date with Dr. Matt, yeah, I know. You are a strong, independent woman, and you've already moved on from Dean Winchester. You don't compare every other man in your life, past and present, to him; you definitely don't frig yourself on the regular remembering the things he can do; and you really definitely don't lie awake at night thinking about how you know so little about his real life that he might as well be a stranger."

The girl unfolded herself from the bleacher. "Look, Little League's not really my scene. I'll be at the Red Robin Motel down on Old I-94. Room 119. Come find me when you're ready to get this show on the road."

She left the bleachers, Doc Martens clunking on the aluminum.

A whistle blew. Lisa watched as the teams swapped places, fielders coming in, batters going out, heart pounding. Little bodies in white and red, white and green walked away from the dugout below her, number four, number ten, number eight, number seven, and—there. Number eleven. The relief was so intense Lisa felt half sick with it. There was Ben, scuffing the turf as he walked slowly out to a plate. Her child. Her whole world.

Almost.

* * *

Matt had surgery in the morning, so he said goodbye at the door of the restaurant. His arms cradled her back just right. His lips felt good against hers, firm, dry, plush. They curled up a little at the very end in a wicked little smirk that made her heart beat faster.

"I'll see you soon, all right?" he murmured into her mouth.

Lisa drew in a breath, then settled back down from her tip-toes and let it out. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. Christ, he was handsome. "Yeah. Sure I can't talk you into coming back to mine? Ben's at that big Little League sleepover."

Matt groaned, and Lisa grinned a little when she felt his dick jump against her thigh. "I really can't, this procedure starts at seven. Want to, though."

"Oh, I know _that."_

He laughed along with her, and then they both drew back. Lisa cleared her throat, still smiling, and tucked her hair behind her ear. "All right. If avoiding malpractice suits is really that important to you."

He grinned and pressed a quick kiss to the inside of her wrist. "I'll call you tomorrow. Say hey to Ben for me, yeah?"

And then he walked her to her car, and got into his, and drove away.

Lisa sat drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, letting the car warm up. It was well into spring, so the car shouldn't need much warming, but still. Better safe than sorry. Her yoga studio was still relatively new here, still precarious as a transplant business despite all the good referrals; car trouble was the last thing she needed.

She pulled away from the curb. Half a block down, she nosed it back in again. Her fingers fumbled with her GPS.

Red Robin Motel. Like there were any motels that weren't chains anymore. This was the twenty-first century. It probably didn't even exist.

"In five hundred meters," said Siri, "turn left onto North Dickman Road."

Lisa put the car in gear.

The Red Robin Motel was everything the imagination conjured—which was to say, not much. Lisa cruised slowly down the parking lot, tires hissing slightly in leftover damp painted by the neon sign in the office window and the paler lights shining from beneath the awning that ran the length of the building. Room 119 was at the end. There was no car in front of it.

Lisa parked.

She got out and stood on the concrete margin between her car and a field lost to darkness beside the parking lot, feeling stupid. A light was on behind the blinds. No doubt it belonged to half of a cash-strapped middle-aged couple, the other half of whom was out fetching takeout. The person in the room would smell of cigarettes and talc, and they would be wary but Midwestern nice when they answered the door. She should get back in her car and leave.

She walked up to the door and knocked.

A voice within said, "It's unlocked."

Lisa turned the dented knob. For some reason, the thing that made her feel the most awkward stepping over the threshold wasn't that she was entering a sleazy motel room for a clandestine rendezvous with a woman who couldn't be human, but that she was still wearing her best heels.

The girl was sitting cross-legged on the end of the bed, Doc Martens on the cheap plastic coverlet. There was absolutely no sign of actual habitation in the room. Lisa hadn't expected any.

"Hello, Lisa."

The light was low, just one lamp with an old-school incandescent bulb casting out yellowed light from under a burgundy shade. It made the girl's eyes look dark and matte and wrong.

"What are you?"

"It's not important."

Lisa wasn't stupid enough to believe that. Yet somehow it didn't seem to matter. If it had, she wouldn't be here.

"Can you really do it?" she asked.

"It's not about what I can do. It's about what we can do together. But yes, you'll see him."

"What will I see?" The plaintive note in her own voice disgusted Lisa. What the _fuck_ was she doing here? What kind of pathetic creature came crawling to a place like this asking for a thing like she was asking?

"Whatever he's doing right now. It'll be like you're right there beside him. Don't worry, you won't really be. He won't be able to see you."

There was a heavy turn in Lisa's stomach. She'd never spied on anyone before, never. Not even her own kid.

Dean had spied on them both, though, during and after. She knew that much. Part of her latched onto that with something like defiance.

"What do I have to give up?" There had to be some massive catch to this that was going to have her walking out the door.

"Nothing but your time."

"You're lying."

"Believe me or don't. I can't stop you."

"I'm done with him," said Lisa. "We're done with each other. We agreed. It's already over."

The girl stood. Her approach was slow; the lamp threw long, black shadows off her form that seemed too jagged to be right. She looked at Lisa, utterly expressionless.

"You want to know if it's true. The thing you're too scared to say, even in your own head."

"Is it?" Lisa whispered.

"Sister, I got no idea. I'm reading your mind, not his. I can tell you this, though: it's going to eat you alive until you know one way or another."

Lisa shut her eyes. "Do it."

The girl smiled. Her teeth were completely normal, normal teeth, twenty-eight of them, white and regular except somehow they also looked like needles. "Give me your hand."

Knowing she should be running, Lisa held it out.

The girl took it. Her fingers wrapped around it and bit down to bone, and Lisa Braeden's world went black.


	2. Chapter 2

Her very first thought, when she could see again, was, _This was a mistake._

Her second was that what she was seeing didn't make sense. She was looking down on the front seat of a darkened car as if she were plastered to the roof of it, and she didn't see how that was possible.

Her third was that she didn't seem to actually have a body.

Where her body was, she had no idea, and that occasioned a moment of free-fall panic. Logically it had to be back in the Red Robin Motel, _she_ had to be, but she couldn't feel it at all. She was utterly untethered.

She was nothing but a view.

Only after all of that did the specifics of what she was seeing actually hit her. The head on her left, in the driver's seat, was Dean. Her heart twisted. And—her brain supplied right after, mostly against her will—that had to make the half-glimpsed shape in the passenger seat Sam.

She turned her gaze, finding that she could turn her gaze, to the passenger seat first. Why, she didn't understand, when it was Dean she had come to see. Or maybe some part of her did understand: the one that told her to know where all the threats were first.

Sam was out cold, a jacket wadded under his head in the nook made by seat and window, face lost in shadow. She wrenched her gaze back to Dean. Like this, she could see him in profile, just the side of him nearest Sam. She watched as he drove, alert and intent on the road, fingers making fast-twitch adjustments to the wheel and a muscle working intermittently in his jaw.

His tension instantly became her tension. She'd gotten good, in the year they'd been together, at preventing exactly that: faced with his grief and his PTSD, she'd had no choice but to build a mental firewall between him and her if either of them were to survive. To be herself a firewall between all of that and Ben, too. But this was a kind of tension she hadn't seen before. She'd seen Dean hypervigilant, all right, but that had been the echoes of remembered combat, past threats. All at once she realized that this was what it looked like when the threat wasn't a memory. They were in the middle of something.

The headlights illuminated a steep, washed out track tunneling through tree trunks set close on either side. It was slow going at this grade; Dean eased the car around a pothole and downshifted, gravel and dry leaves crunching under the tires. Lisa wondered that Sam could sleep through it, especially with whatever danger that had Dean looking like that bearing down on them.

It took forever, but finally the road broke through a tree line and the incline dropped off. Across a clearing, the car's headlines washed over dark walls and dark, blank windows: a cabin.

The car rounded a final switchback in the drive and ground to a halt in front of the place. Lisa glimpsed a porch, a shed, a woodpile. Then Dean turned off the engine and the headlights cut out.

A bare thread of moonlight showed her Dean's face. For a moment he stared out the darkened windshield, and despite the dark, he looked haggard. He inhaled, dragging a hand down his face and over his mouth, before he switched on the dome light and turned to the passenger seat.

Lisa did a double-take at the figure slumped against the window there. The Sam she knew was a wall of muscle. The Sam who'd walked through her kitchen door and exploded her life was built like a linebacker who'd done a stint in the NBA. This person looked ill. His face was thin and pale, with dark circles under the eyes and waxy skin, and it was impossible to believe that this was the same man who months before had radiated not menace, but a brutal efficiency far scarier. This Sam looked vulnerable.

Her sense of a threat in the room did not lessen.

Dean rummaged around behind the bench seat and came up with an extra jacket and a ratty blanket. He started to drape the jacket over Sam's shoulders, then stopped and put it down, lips clamped in an unhappy line. He inspected his brother. The stop hadn't woken Sam; he sat where he was, motionless and breathing shallowly. The yellow dome light showed livid bruising high on one cheekbone and what looked to Lisa like stitches at his temple.

Careful not to wake him, Dean reached out and pulled a small cloth bundle on a string from beneath Sam's jacket. Lisa was startled to recognize it as a hex bag. Dean had stashed one in her mattress and in Ben's, back in Michigan. Now he swallowed, nodded to himself, and placed it back under Sam's shirts as gently as he'd removed it before tucking first the jacket and then the blanket around his shoulders.

The window Sam was resting against was covered in symbols—most in white paint, but a couple in what sure as hell looked like blood. Trying to focus on them gave Lisa a headache, but she didn't think she'd seen any of them before.

Dean expelled a breath. "Be right back," he muttered, and climbed out of the car.

The movement yanked her out after him. It was incredibly disorienting, the more so for being painless. One moment she was looking down on Dean and his brother from the vicinity of the dome light; the next, she was over Dean's shoulder as he threw open the trunk and hefted two heavily loaded duffels to his shoulders. She'd been wrong when she'd thought herself untethered. She was tethered, all right: to Dean.

Dean strode up the walk, and Lisa trailed after him like a balloon.

The cabin was situated on a flat outcropping overlooking whatever mountain they'd just climbed up. It was a modestly sized structure of white pine, rustic but somehow nicer than anything Lisa would have pegged for the hunting lifestyle. Yet Dean couldn't be squatting; when he climbed the steps to the porch, he reached up to a specific spot on top of one of the crossbeams and let himself in with the key he found there.

And he let her in with him. It was strange to find herself pulled through thin air with no body to actually feel it. All that followed Dean was her gaze.

He wrestled with a fuse box with a flashlight in his mouth for a minute, and then the lights came on. He turned for a minute, taking the place in. It was bare the way structures that sat empty eleven months out of the year were, but, yes, nice. To the left of the front door was an open space that served as foyer, living room, and, in a niche set into the back wall, bedroom. A wood stove sat in the middle. Straight ahead Lisa glimpsed a bathroom and, through a wide doorway on the right, a kitchen and dining room. A narrow staircase along that one dividing wall led to a loft that Dean poked his head up into briefly before returning to the ground floor. Decorative touches like a shadow box full of fishing flies graced the living room walls and the couch had a windowpane afghan folded along its back. Lisa wasn't sure how Dean had come to be here, but the place clearly wasn't his.

He didn't spend long contemplating the décor. From one of the duffels he took a can of spray paint and what looked for all the world like a whiteout pen; without ceremony, he pulled back the braided rug from the front door and laid down a devil's trap in spray paint. Lisa heard the hiss of the paint but couldn't smell it.

While that dried, he moved straight on to the windows. She half expected those to get the spray can treatment—the way Bobby Singer's windows had, the time she and Ben had been there—but instead he pulled out a sheet of paper and started copying whatever was on it onto the glass in precise lines with the whiteout. The symbols were fairly intricate; he repeated the process on each window in the place, including the small one between two narrow children's beds in the loft, and Lisa could see him barely reining in his impatience.

Once, halfway through, he stepped out onto the porch to check on Sam. Lisa couldn't make anything out through the dark car window, but apparently it appeased Dean, if barely. He finished the rest of the cabin's windows, checked on Sam one more time, and then immediately went back inside and drew a knife over the meat of his thumb.

So it had been blood she'd seen in the car. Dean milked the shallow cut and fingerpainted something onto the window glass.

When he'd anointed all of the windows in this fashion, he stuck his head out the door one more time before he started opening cabinets until he found one with blankets and linen. He made up the bed at the back of the cabin and then finally went back out to retrieve his brother.

Dean paused beside the car. The light spilling out of the cabin's front door reflected on the passenger side window and Lisa couldn't see past it; Dean rapped softly on the glass, waited a few seconds, and then opened the door slowly.

Sam halfway fell out. Dean was ready for it, already crouching down to catch him by the shoulder as he started awake. Sam's reactions seemed slowed, almost drugged. He shook his head and tried to fix his eyes on Dean like a concussed cat.

"Dean?"

Dean grinned. "You all right there, Cheech?"

Sam swayed himself more or less upright in the seat so he was no longer poised for a header into the gravel. "Yeah. Yeah."

Dean's grin faded to a grimace. "Let's get you inside."

"'Kay."

Sam let Dean pull him out and to his feet and, with one of Dean's arm's clamped around his waist, started picking his way up the flagstone path from driveway to porch. Then he looked up at the cabin itself and stopped.

"I thought we were going to Bobby's."

"'Someplace safe,' I believe I said." Dean tugged at him. "C'mon."

Sam still had enough bulk that when Dean tried to move him, he went nowhere. He looked from the cabin to his brother. "Dean, no. It's not safe for you."

"I'll be the judge of that."

 _"Dean."_ Sam looked desperate. The expression clashed badly with his enormous pupils and the way they kept crossing slightly. "We have to get to Bobby's. You have to—"

"We're in Pennsylvania," Dean said bluntly. "There isn't time."

Sam gaped at him. "Dean—"

"Come _on,_ Sam."

This time when Dean propelled him toward the cabin, Sam went, slowly. He stumbled on the steps up to the porch.

Once they were inside, Dean steered him straight to the bed and dumped him on the mattress. Sam hissed and clenched his eyes shut; Dean froze. "You gonna puke?"

"Dunno," Sam said thickly.

Dean cursed and went for the bathroom wastebasket.

By the time he got back, Sam was deep-breathing through whatever nausea had hit him. He took the basket wordlessly from his brother.

"Hate to say it, dude," said Dean, "but we gotta get you fed and watered while you're conscious for it."

Sam groaned, hid his face against the rim of the wastebasket, and shot Dean the finger.

"Don't be a brat, you know it'll help."

Whether Dean understood Sam's muttered response or only its tone, amusement flickered over his face. "Gonna get the wood stove going," he announced, "then it's chow time for both of us. Just… stay there and don't throw up on anything."

Outside on the porch, Dean pinched the bridge of his nose once, hard, for about five seconds. Then he breathed in deeply, let it out, and started taking methodical inventory of the contents of the wood rack. Lisa hadn't made it far in the Girl Scouts, but she knew the basics. Tinder, kindling, a few sticks of pine, and several logs of hardwood got piled in a big tin wood tub, which Dean then hefted with barely a grunt.

He shouldered his way back inside. Lisa didn't miss the way the first place his gaze went was the bed at the back of the cabin, or the infinitesimal way he relaxed right after. He couldn't have been outside for more than ten minutes.

 _I love my sister,_ she thought. _Not being able to breathe on the other side of a wall from her doesn't mean I don't love my sister._

The thought wasn't defensive. It was true and Lisa knew it for truth. She knew she had nothing to prove on that score. All that being so, she had no idea why it left her shaking with anger.

Dean busied himself arranging twigs in the bottom of the wood stove. "What do you want for dinner?" he asked. It felt more like an attempt to engage than a request for information.

Sam was shivering where he sat on the edge of the mattress, but almost absent-mindedly, like he hadn't noticed. His eyes were glassy. "Huh?"

"The stuff you put in your mouth and swallow. Makes you grow big and strong. Tastes good, if you're lucky."

Sam's head snapped up. He'd gone a shade paler.

Dean glanced up at him and frowned. "Food. Grub. Chow. Rations. What do you want?" He flicked on the fireplace lighter he held at the base of the twigs he'd arranged.

Slowly Sam shook his head. One of his fingers picked absently at the cuticle of the thumb of the same hand. "Not hungry."

"Wrong answer." Dean touched a bit of kindling into the path of the building flames, snatched his hand back, and sucked on his fingers as he slammed the wood stove door. He stood. "Hope you feel like soup, 'cause that's what's on the menu till I find out where Jerry keeps his spatulas." He headed for the door.

The backseat of Dean's car was full of groceries. Lisa's bewilderment grew. Despite the level of paranoia she'd just spent the last hour watching, somewhere on the way here he'd apparently stopped at a Costco, or something, because there was enough in there to feed a family of three for at least a couple weeks. It was like he was preparing for a blizzard. Or a siege.

When he shouldered his way back into the cabin, Sam was in the hallway and approximately upright, staring at a pair of snowshoes mounted on the wall with a sprig of lavender on them with a look of horrified fascination. "Where _are_ we?"

Dean started rooting through the couple bags he'd retrieved on the dining room table. "You remember Jerry Panowski?"

"Jerry? Jerry from a million years ago? Jerry at the airport?"

"That's the one." Dean inspected a can of soup, met Sam's eyes, and set it down to come steer his brother back to the bed. He pointedly wrapped the afghan around his shoulders. "We need to hole up for a while. Bobby's is the first place they'd check."

Lips pursed, Sam nodded slowly. "You're right. We can't bring this to his door. 'S too dangerous for him."

Dean stared at him for a beat, like those were for some reason the dumbest words he'd ever heard, before he just said, flatly, "Right. So, instead, Jerry. Like you said, it's been a million years, no one's going to connect us with him. I remembered he had this place because he took his family here while Dad and I were cleaning out that poltergeist he had, and he owes us. It's ours as long as we need it."

Lisa watched Sam processing this. Whatever he was on made the operation visible on his face and slow. He looked up at Dean at the end of it. "Does it have a basement?" he asked.

Dean's face darkened. He turned and headed for the kitchen. "Don't know. Don't care."

"Dean, we have to talk about this," said Sam.

"Nah, I'm pretty sure we don't," Dean called back.

His departure pulled Lisa with him into the kitchen. There she got to watch him making soup. Soup and crackers. This was not a riveting procedure, nor a quick one with the amount of cursing and hunting for kitchenware included in it, so it was there, disembodied about a yard and a half over a reconstituted can of Great Value alphabet soup, that everything finally sank in.

She was here-but-not-here watching Dean Winchester and his brother get ready for something apocalyptic in a cabin in Pennsylvania. They had no idea she was. The things she was seeing were too specific, too bizarre, too _banal_ to be any dream or hallucination of her own. She'd been at it for at least an hour, now, which meant that in a two-star motor court back in Michigan, her body had been oblivious and vulnerable for an equal amount of time, and not a soul except the thing that had invited her knew where to find her.

This was insane. It was _wrong,_ it was out of character for her, and it was hands-down the most dangerous thing she'd ever done. She didn't belong here. So with a wrench, she willed herself back to her body.

Nothing happened.

 _I want to get off the ride,_ she thought in sudden, stark terror, but in the same moment realized she had no inkling how to.

Dean stirred soup clockwise, counterclockwise, and clockwise again, and Lisa began truly to panic.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She'd asked what she had to sacrifice to make this happen, but it had never once occurred to her to ask how to make it _stop_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 🎶 You ain't nothin but an id fic 🎶  
> 🎶 Schmoopin all the time 🎶

On TV, when protagonists got astral projected or woke up as ghosts, Lisa always saw them waving their hands in front of the other characters, shouting, "Hey! Hey!" Then the other characters would stare grayly out a window, sigh over some matter significant to the plot, and ignore them. After an improbable amount of time, the protagonist would start to catch on to the fact that something didn't tally, right around the time some other, magical—or at least supernatural—character said suddenly, "They can't hear you."

Lisa had no hands to wave. It never crossed her mind that anyone here would hear her, because she had no mouth to form a voice. Her supernatural sidekick didn't seem interested in popping up with caustic but helpful tips on navigating the plane on which she'd found herself.

She'd asked what she had to sacrifice to make this happen, but it had never once occurred to her to ask how to make it _stop_.

It wasn't like Lisa to be this kind of stupid. It really wasn't. She'd been a single mother for the first eleven years of her son's life, a freelancer her entire adulthood, and she'd done well enough in both roles to keep herself and her kid safe from the monsters of twenty-first century American economics. Those might not be supernatural, but they had teeth and rapacity enough.

She was—Lisa disliked the word _cautious,_ but she thought she could call herself _deliberate_. She thought things through. She lived her life alive to the consequences of the actions she took. Yet a creature right out of a horror movie offered her something right out of a Hans Christian Andersen story, and Lisa threw all of that out the window in exchange for—

What was she even witnessing, here?

Dean set the soup out on the dining table. "Soup's on," he called to his brother. "Uh, literally." He busied himself fetching crackers from the kitchen.

Crackers. She was witnessing crackers. She'd put her life at risk for crackers, and now her panic began to edge toward hysteria.

Dean frowned when he found the dining room still empty. "Sam?"

Silence greeted him; he threw the saltines on the table and strode out to the main room. "Sammy?"

It too was empty. Dean glanced all around the living area, stuck his head in the bathroom and turned on the light even though Lisa could tell from the hallway that no one was in there, and then looked up toward the loft, calling his brother's name again. He started for the stairs and then stopped.

A door was set into the wall under the stairs, rustic pine to match the walls. It was ajar.

Dean threw it open and pounded down the stairs revealed. The basement was bare except for a washer and dryer, with cinder block walls and two stout posts dividing the space. Sam looked up from looping laundry cord around one of them.

Dean grabbed him by the arms and shook him. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" he snarled.

The venom in his voice made Lisa wish she could back away. Sam didn't even react. "You can tie me down in here," he said.

For a second, Lisa thought Dean was going to hit him. Instead, after a second, he released him, shoving him away. Sam stumbled and caught himself on the post.

"Dean, listen to me."

"No. I said no. We're not doing that, so stop fucking asking."

"You think I want to do this?" Sam's face twisted. "I really don't. But they didn't leave me much choice, so _help_ me."

"The hell do you think I'm trying to do, Sam?"

"I think you're trying to protect me, but it's too late for that! Dean, it's done. It's in me now, and you know what's coming next. So you have to lock me down. We don't have any other options."

"Yeah, Sammy, we do. All right? Just… just come upstairs and eat your damn soup and I'll tell you what we're gonna do, okay? Please."

The rage had gone out of Dean. This was fear. Pleading. It occurred to Lisa the she hadn't ever seen him plead. In the space of an hour, she'd seen so many things she never had in a year of living with this man.

She was never supposed to. That was the worst of it: this wasn't meant for her. It was awful to know because of what it meant about what she'd done, what she was doing; she was a spy now, a voyeur, and there was no undoing that stain. She felt filthy. She deserved to. But it was awful also because _this wasn't meant for her_.

So many parts of him never had been.

Sam was wavering, hesitant in a way that made him look much younger out of nowhere. Dean pressed his advantage, clasping his brother's face in both his hands. "All right? Okay?"

Doubtfully, Sam nodded. Dean sagged in relief.

Lisa could not recall a time she'd held her sister by her face. But that didn't mean anything. There was no reason that should mean anything.

Getting Sam back up the basement stairs was time-consuming. Dean deposited him on the bed again and went back for the food.

In the living room, Sam was sitting on the floor very near the wood stove, eyes closed to drink in its heat. Dean shrugged, set the food down on the pine boards, and joined him. He groaned a little, some of the tension in his shoulders unspooling.

"'S good, right?" said Sam.

"Not bad," Dean allowed. "But no sleeping. Eat at least half of that."

Sam opened his eyes. "Tell me what the plan is, and I will."

Dean crumbled saltines into each of their bowls and waited until Sam started moving his spoon before he said, "How did we get you here?"

Sam paused. "The drugs were just in case. Just in case it started before we got to Bobby's, I thought."

"I mean, yeah, because we couldn't have you flinging around your psychic shit while we're doing seventy down a highway." Dean slurped his own soup, nodded pointedly at Sam's, then went on. "So we sedated you. Right?"

Lisa saw the moment Sam got where this was going, even though she had not the faintest idea where the hell that was herself. (Sedation? _Psychic shit?_ She had to have heard that wrong. What could Dean actually have said? _Psychosis_?)

(That did not make her feel any better.)

"You want to drug me for the whole thing," Sam said slowly.

Dean hesitated, then put his soup down. "Yes." He looked up at Sam. "It's not great. I know that. I don't like the idea of pumping that much shit into you for that long without a doctor around to watch the process, but Sam— God. Do you know what this could do to your wall?"

Sam swallowed. "No."

The hell did the walls have to do with anything?

"Neither do I. And I don't want to find out."

"But we don't know if drugs will do anything. Can you even knock someone out for demon blood withdrawal?"

"Can you do what for _what?"_ Lisa attempted to say.

Not that she could be heard. "I dunno, but it's got to be worth a shot. There are risks, and I'm not saying that there aren't and I'm not saying that I like them, but none of them are as bad as that wall coming down."

"We don't know how long it'll take," said Sam. Meaning detox from _demon blood,_ apparently. "How long can you keep me under?"

"The last time— It was rough, but it only lasted a couple of days."

Oh, there'd been a last time.

"Yeah, but that's no guarantee about this time!"

"Well, maybe it'll be shorter," Dean said stubbornly. "With Famine, you drank a lot, right?"

Lisa hadn't thought Sam could get any paler, but he blanched. "Right," he said, very quietly.

"Did they give you that much, where they had you?"

Sam stayed silent several seconds before, haltingly, he shook his head.

"Then maybe we can get you through this. Maybe it doesn't have to be like before." Dean leaned forward. "It's worth a try, Sam."

Sam's tongue moistened his lower lip; he stared into the soup bowl like it contained at least the mysteries of the cosmos, if not the answers. In his defense, he was apparently high as a kite.

Lisa felt… she wasn't sure how she felt. Sick? She was fairly sure she ought to feel sick, but she was a bit too stuck on disbelief for that. She knew that demons were real. She knew that demons were _people_. If someone had asked her to speculate on what unusual qualities their blood might have, well, she wasn't certain what she'd have guess those might be, but _addictive_ would not have been one of them.

And apparently Sam Winchester had a little drinky problem with it. Like his brother had with goddamned Jim Beam.

Lisa had a vision of her mother, more vivid than any that had plagued her in years, looking her up and down and saying in tones of faint disbelief more stinging than blatant incredulity could ever be, _You really do know how to pick them._

She scrutinized Sam. Hooked on demon blood. How did someone even find out that was a thing? She wondered how far back it went and then laughed a bit hysterically at herself for wondering. It was a valid question, though. Dean had mentioned that Sam had made some mistakes he'd paid for, usually while at least a little bit drunk. Once, about three weeks in, completely plastered with Ben away at summer camp, he'd cursed his brother roundly for "all the shit he'd put him through" and punctuated it with a glass against the wall. Lisa had thought he meant Sam dying. Now the words had a different complexion. Not much could make a person bitterer than loving someone through an addiction. She ought to know.

Or—wait. She thought of Sam the day he'd walked through the kitchen door of the home she'd shared with Dean. At the time, she hadn't had much bandwidth to notice or care, but he'd been different from the kid she'd met briefly back in 2008 in ways that went beyond the muscle he'd put on. Certainly he was different from this man she saw now. That difference was even starker.

"All right," Sam said quietly, startling Lisa.

Dean sagged with relief. "You'll try it?"

"Yeah."

"Good. Finish your soup."

Sam grimaced, but did as instructed. Eleven years of parenthood meant that Lisa couldn't miss the covert glances Dean snuck at his progress, nor the incremental easing of the tension in his shoulders as his brother ate.

There was nothing wrong in that. Dean had talked about being a big brother often enough, had stressed how responsible he felt for Sam. Seeing a kind of attention in him for which she had no better word than _parental_ ought to make her feel less unsettled, if anything.

"All right," said Dean briskly as they closed in on the finish line with their meal. "We get us clean, we get you patched, we hit the sack. You up to a shower right now?"

Oh, shit.

Sam hesitated, sniffed himself, grimaced, wavered, made a face, and shook his head regretfully. Lisa let out a mental breath. Small favors.

"Fine." Dean was in full drill sergeant mode, or at least one somewhere between what she suspected might be the real thing and the plush toy version of it he'd adopted often enough with Ben. "Teeth, ribs, hay. I'm looking at your stitches in five."

Sam rolled his eyes, but he didn't protest when Dean stayed close enough to spot him while he got himself upright.

Next Lisa got the treat of watching Dean do the dishes, which she supposed beat out watching her ex's brother tend to oral hygiene and drain his bladder. It could only be a matter of time before nature beckoned Dean, though. She couldn't fool herself that she hadn't already violated him and his brother both in a way they'd never forgive. At least, she couldn't fool herself now that it was done. But to watch him strip and bathe and eliminate—she had to get out of here before then.

She used visualization a lot with some of her clients. As she was not an especially visual person, it had never really been her thing, but she'd walked enough people through the process it was well rehearsed, anyway.

_Take your feeling and make it a place. Anxiety? Panic? Make it a room. The walls are your fears. The beams are your assumptions. You have other feelings, you have other thoughts. You're the architect here. Make a door. See the door. What color is it? What shape is the doorknob? Open the door and walk through it._

As Dean stooped to riffle through a duffel bag for an alarmingly weatherbeaten first aid kit, Lisa visualized a door in the middle of this experience. She saw herself reach out and turn the knob and swing it open. Absolutely nothing happened.

Sam emerged from the bathroom in boxers and a t-shirt, the latter of which he began gingerly to pull over his head as he sat on the edge of the bed. Without a word, Dean helped him, moving his limbs not exactly gently but carefully.

The skin revealed was purpled up like the sky in a tornado warning, disappearing under an Ace wrap over his ribs. Lower down, a dark line of stitches showed through translucent tape, and the other side of his abdomen was covered in scabs and scrapes. He looked like he'd been hit by a car.

"Next time you're gonna get yourself hit by a car," said Dean, unwinding the Ace wrap, "aim for a late-model coupé, yeah?"

"I'll take it under advisement." Sam grimaced as Dean probed, but let him.

Dean peeled off the tape, examined the line of stitches—which looked inflamed to Lisa, but what did she know, maybe it was an improvement—and grunted his satisfaction. "All right, you know the drill. Deep breath."

Sam inhaled once, deeply. Lisa watched his rib cage expand and hold it, watched his concave belly twitch and the quiver of whipcord muscle in his shoulders. She watched Dean watch it.

After what seemed like an eternity, Sam exhaled. He repeated the process twice more before Dean nodded, apparently satisfied that he could.

KT tape replaced the Ace wrap. Antiseptic went on various of the lacerations, including a couple on Sam's legs and an ugly gash high on his thigh. Lisa watched Dean part his brother's legs and ease the cloth of his boxers up, up, up. She watched his fingers skirt white butterfly closures on a line of purple-red. She watched the fine hairs between Sam's thighs lift with goosepimples they left behind. She watched the distance between Dean's mouth and the wound he bent over. She watched Dean's thumb smooth over the dip on the inside of Sam's knee as he finished and sat back on his haunches, and had no idea what she felt.

Still kneeling, Dean helped his brother get his shirt on again and asked quietly, "How we feeling?"

The _we_ added a weight of expectation to the question. "All right," Sam answered. "Sore, kinda hung over. It's not here yet." When Dean still looked unhappy, he added, "I don't know how much longer."

"Keep me updated," said Dean, shaking out ibuprofen for his brother to dry-swallow. "Don't wanna start pumping you full of the the strong stuff any sooner than we have to."

Visibly bracing himself for resistance, Sam said, "We'll try it your way. But if it starts to go sideways, I want you to tie me down. I don't want to come out of this just to find out I hurt you. Not to mention that we'll both be screwed if I do."

Dean snapped the first aid kit shut. "We've been fucking over this."

"Dean, you have to. I—"

"What? Deserve it?" Dean threw the kit to the floor by the bags; Sam flinched. "You didn't do this, Sam. And we're gonna get the sons of bitches who did. You hearing me?" After a minute, when he still didn't have an answer, Dean prompted, "Sam?"

Sam's eyes drifted up to him. They seemed clear, now, despite the bruised purple around them; he studied Dean for a long moment before saying, "Yeah. We will."

Nothing softened in Dean's face. Without stirring from his crouch, he thrust his hand out and waited.

Sam reached out and clasped Dean's hand with sudden, bone-crushing force. Dean returned it with a grip that showed the tendons all the way up his arm. Eyes locked, they held the grip in a moment that seemed to stretch to the ends of the room.

There was a word for what Lisa had come here fearing. It hung in the corners of her mind no matter how oblivious she willed herself; it had lived under the bed for a year in Indiana. Tonight alone, this was one of the less overtly strange ways she'd seen Dean Winchester look at his brother, but she wasn't sure she wouldn't have preferred to see them kissing.

They broke the grip and the eye contact as wordlessly as they'd held it. Dean pushed to his feet, jerked his chin toward the bed, and went to the bathroom.

Lisa managed to look at the towel bar over the toilet while Dean did his business instead of actually staring directly at her ex-lover's genitals while he urinated, but try as she might, she couldn't pull farther away. Whatever had brought her to Dean kept her with him.

He went out to the main room, shucking his overshirt as he went. Another log went into the fire. He killed the lights, leaving only the red glow of the stove, and then Lisa heard the clink of his belt buckle as his jeans hit the floor and were kicked away somewhere.

"Scoot," Dean grunted at the lump on the mattress.

Lisa had no muscles to freeze while she watched her ex-boyfriend peel back the covers of a bed he apparently intended to share with his brother. Sam made a sound, fading fast, and sheets rustled.

Finally Dean was settled. As Lisa adapted to the low level of light in the room, she could gradually make out the expression on his face as he lay, staring up at the ceiling.

Gray was the only word she could find for it. Haggard didn't go far enough. Haggard was what he'd been before; this was haggardness with the skin peeled off of it, the raw thing under the eschar of fatigue.

And Lisa understood at least something of what was happening. This was the way someone fell apart only when they'd won through to temporary safety. This was the way someone crumbled when there was time and space and, above all, no one to watch.

A thousand miles from her body was much too far for Lisa to feel this cold.

She wasn't the only one watching.

"Dean?"

Dean started slightly and looked over at Sam. He didn't hide the expression away. His face was too broken open to close off again in a moment, or maybe he thought the dimness hid him. Or maybe, and there was an unlovely reason Lisa didn't want it to be true, he just didn't mind letting Sam see this.

Cloth whispered. "Dean? What is it?"

"Nothing," Dean said softly. "We're good here, Sammy."

Sam's voice was already drowsy in the shadows. "You need it, don't you?"

Dean's mouth turned down, turned grim. "Go to sleep, Sam."

"'Kay." Sam faded out.

Dean shut his eyes. After a minute, he scrunched up loosely on his side, one hand around something under his pillow, turned toward his brother in the darkness.

Then came long stretch of nothing.

Lisa couldn't move. She couldn't even close her eyes, for all that she couldn't stop seeing. She'd thought she was panicking before, but some part of her had still been assuming that whatever had brought her here, it'd have had its fill when the action was over and _things stopped happening_. She'd assumed that this had an expiration date, even if it was one Lisa was none too comfortable with. But the redness of the light morphed and shifted as the fire burned down and Dean turned onto his back, twitched his way through a long dream, and stilled to snoring again, and Lisa still hung as inert as a balloon above him.

She tried visualizing a door again. She tried several doors. She stayed where she was.

Something had to work here eventually. Lisa had built her life on that: if something wasn't working, try, try again. Hers was not the stylish defiance of either Dean or the dozen or more men who had preceded him. She'd learned early on that flair only took attention and time she did not have to spare, but that simply refusing to be deterred generally yielded the results she needed sooner or later.

She visualized herself a body to walk through the door she kept drawing in her mind. She visualized fists, and she visualized beating them against the walls it took no imagination at all to see locking her in. She visualized herself a voice, and she visualized screaming.

_Let me out_

A log crumbled quietly in the stove behind her. The quality of the dimness evolved as the moon edged into the window she could not see and then passed out of it. Sam and Dean's breathing stayed slow and quiet and thick.

_Let me out let me out_

She saw her imagined fists go bloody and willed herself to feel it, to come back to her body and know it for hers.

_Let me out let me out let me out let me out let me out let me out let me out LET ME OUT—_

Sam Winchester started awake. His eyes cracked open in the dark.

A second later, Dean moved, more audible than visible. "Sam? What?"

There was barely enough light for her to see Sam frowning faintly, as if listening for something. A moment later, he shook his head.

"Nothing," he murmured, already receding back into sleep. "Thought I heard something."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This will eventually be a fill for [this prompt](https://spnkink-meme.livejournal.com/155538.html?thread=47330706#t47330706), as well.


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